What will we do when machines do all the work?

But I think what happened in the last decade, especially in the area of robotics and software automation, is such huge progress has been made, and people start weathering the big recession, which made people very sensitive to the issue of jobs. And economists started paying attention to the fact that really, we’re now seeing a trend of about 30 years that includes the compression of income, for middle- and low-income workers, growing inequality in the economy, a greater and greater portion of the economy going to capital vs. labor. So this has become over the last year a very, very hot topic among economists to understand what’s happening to the job market. And so suddenly this issue that I think 10 years ago everybody was shrugging Bill Joy’s article off, suddenly it’s become something that’s on everybody’s mind.